CANADA, THE UN, AND THE RWANDAN TUTSI GENOCIDE

Canadian Christianity
April 20 2007

Photo: Refugees fleeing the 1994 slaughter in Rwanda.

The following address by David Kilgour, a former Member of Parliament
and cabinet minister under Prime Minister Jean Chretien, was given
April 7 at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.

IT IS FITTING that so many of us are commemorating the 13th anniversary
of the genocide on the very day when the murder of more than 800,000
Rwandans over the ensuing 100 terrible days began.

If the international community as a whole is finally to cease
re-interpreting our "never again" pledges, made following the
Holocaust, Armenia, the Ukrainian famine, Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo
and Rwanda, as "again and again" in new catastrophes such as Darfur,
we must constantly remember what happened to the Rwandan Tutsis
and moderate Hutus, who were abandoned by the UN and rest of the
international community.

UN role

My first focus is the UN role in Rwanda and the source is the recently
published book, The Best Intentions — Kofi Annan and the UN in an Era
of American Power by James Traub. A journalist for the New York Times
Magazine, Traub had good access to Annan and his staff since 2003;
the book is excellent on numerous topics, including Rwanda. The key
points it makes are these:

When Annan, with little experience in peacekeeping, became the
under-secretary-general for peacekeeping in early 1993, a number
of crises were already underway. In one of them, Bosnia, where
UN peacekeepers proved unable to stop an unspeakable massacre
at Srebrenica and the killing of 37 people in a Sarajevo market,
only NATO bombing for two weeks without UN Security Council approval
persuaded the Serbs to sign a draft peace agreement. Traub concludes
correctly that the UN "intervened timidly and clumsily" in the Balkans
and did not intervene at all in Rwanda.

Best Intentions describes the events in Rwanda which led to
the catastrophe and then focuses on the January 11, 1994 "most
notorious cable in UN history" from Romeo Dallaire, commander of the
UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) to General Maurice Baril,
(UN Secretary General) Boutros-Ghali’s military advisor, about hidden
Interahamwe weapons, which some said could kill up to a thousand
Tutsis in twenty minutes. Annan soon signed the never-to-be-forgotten
response, directing that Dallaire do nothing "until clear guidance
is received from Headquarters"

The author is clearly sympathetic to Annan overall in the book, but
he quotes his subject looking callous at least when in the overall
context he asked him why he did not refer the cable to the Security
Council: "Obviously we don’t take pieces of cables to the Security
Council." Annan then makes himself look both foolish and weak when
he attempts to convince Traub that his inaction in Rwanda can be
justified by the almost simultaneous problems in Somalia: "It was
probably not a good call."

Traub adds that the ultimate responsibility over what later happened
in Rwanda was Secretary General Boutros-Ghali and that he, who "has
never expressed remorse over any of the catastrophes that took place
on his watch, blames the member states (and notes in his memoirs that
throughout January he was ‘away from New York and not in close touch
with the Rwandan situation’). And the key member states blame the
Secretariat for failing to keep them informed. Where did the buck
stop? Nowhere."

An independent inquiry into the UN’s role in Rwanda later concluded
that Annan’s peacekeeping department erred in not bringing Dallaire’s
cable to the Security Council’s attention. Even worse was its failure
subsequently to press Rwandan President Habyarimana to take action
against the militias. At the end of January, when Dallaire prepared a
detailed plan to seize the illegal weapons, he received yet another
cable from Annan, in effect telling him not to move. Dallaire later
described this as "yet another body blow."

When the mass murders and rapes began on April 7, immediately after
Rwandan President Habyarimana’s plane exploded from a missile hit,
Dallaire was then told by Annan that he was not to side with moderate
Hutus in the hope of helping them to stop the genocidaires. Two days
later, compounding this irresolution, Annan told him that UNAMIR
might have to withdraw from Rwanda. The US Secretary of State, Warren
Christopher, was soon going along with the Belgium Foreign Minister’s
request for a complete withdrawal of UNAMIR after Belgium’s government
had withdrawn its 1300 soldiers immediately after ten of them where
killed by genocidaires. Traub notes that the US government was by then
fully aware that "the killing was systematic and widespread." The
then US ambassador to the UN Madeline Albright finally agreed to
accept what she termed a "skeletal" force of 270 led by Dallaire to
remain in Rwanda.

Traub: "By the end of April, estimates of deaths had reached as
high as half a million, and the newspapers and airwaves were filled
with accounts of unspeakable savagery, and yet the UN continued to
behave as if Rwanda presented a conventional problem of political
reconciliation . . . Boutros-Ghali did not use the word ‘genocide’
until early May . . . the Clinton administration was by then twisting
itself into rhetorical knots to avoid using the word at all for fear
of triggering the provisions of the UN Convention on the Prevention
and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which requires signatories to
‘prevent and punish’ such crimes."

The slaughter ended only three months later when Paul Kagame and his
Rwandese Patriotic Front soldiers finally took the capital city Kigali,
declared a cease-fire and formed a new government without international
or UN help. In short, the roles of the UN Security Council, the member
governments, the Secretary General and Kofi Annan during the genocide
were all but unforgivable to the Rwandan people and many others across
the world who thought that the UN under its Charter was supposed to
represent all of its member states equally in peacekeeping crises.

Role of Canada

Shake Hands with the Devil by Romeo Dallaire was published in 2003
and is no doubt familiar to most of you. We can only wish that every
high school and university graduate in our country and everywhere else
had to read it. Some days, one wonders if any of the governments and
diplomats dealing with the ongoing Darfur debacle — which has aptly
been termed "Rwanda in slow motion" — even know that the book exists.

The thesis of Dallaire’s book, of course, is that Rwandans and his
small group of UNAMIR peacekeepers were abandoned by the UN and
the international community, including the Canadian and other home
governments. He makes many important points, but my time I’ll only
repeat two of them:

Almost 50 years to the day that his father and father-in-law "helped
to liberate Europe-when the extermination camps were uncovered and
when, in one voice, humanity said, ‘Never Again’ — we once again
sat back and permitted this unspeakable horror to occur. We could
not find the political will or the resources to stop it . . . It is
my feeling that this recent catastrophe is being forgotten and its
lessons submerged in ignorance and apathy. The genocide in Rwanda
was a failure of humanity that could easily happen again."

Today, between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, it seems appropriate
to refer to the title of the book and the concluding note of its
preface. Asked if he can still believe in God after all that he saw in
Rwanda, Canada’s national hero writes: " . . . there is a God because
in Rwanda I shook hands with the devil . . . I know the devil exists,
and therefore I know there is a God."

Two personal observations

First, Dallaire has said frequently that he thinks that a few
thousand well-trained peacemakers could have prevented the massacre in
Rwanda. The new Chretien government in office in 1993 clearly failed
Rwandans, UNAMIR and Dallaire by not sending a decent contingent
of Canadian soldiers with him. As Dallaire notes in the book, it
is expected that the home government of every UN mission commander
will send a respectable number to demonstrate that it is pulling its
weight. How else can other governments be persuaded to send necessary
numbers as well?

And second, in the period 1992-1994, the Canadian Tutsi communities
in Montreal and Ottawa sought repeatedly to raise awareness with
the Mulroney and Chretien governments about what was being prepared
in Rwanda with no visible success. As a Member of Parliament, I
recall visiting the Pearson building with some them on two or three
occasions. We’d leave shaking our heads at the indifference and general
ignorance about conditions in Rwanda among supposed specialists in
the Foreign Affairs ministry. After Kagame formed a new government,
I recall that one of his ministers had considerable difficulty in
obtaining a visa to visit Canada.

Conclusion

In conclusion sadly, we Canadians — aside from Dallaire, his
colleague in Rwanda Major Brent Beardsley, Dr James Orbinski, who
saved "hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people" (Dallaire) working at
the King Faisal hospital in Kigali throughout the genocide, a group of
brave and dedicated staff of Rwandan nationals at the Canadian mission
in Kigali, and other mostly unknown persons (I recall for instance
a Rwandan nun at settlement on the road to Lake Kivu telling me in
1997 that her life was spared by a mob coming to kill her because
of the bravery of a Canadian priest who persuaded them to leave) —
we Canadians and all UN member countries have little to be proud of
about our role in the Rwandan Tutsi Genocide.

Will we make up for it with our actions as we face future crises?

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